On: US hits three Iranian oil tankers after saying its warships were targeted

5 September 2026

The report says warships were struck at, and so tankers were struck in return. I write down the sequence and resist the sequence, because the sequence is never the cause.

The stated cause is a missile. The structural cause sits older and heavier: two powers arranged against each other across a narrow sea through which a fifth of the world’s oil must pass, each having spent years building the positions from which a first shot becomes likely. When both sides prepare for a collision, the collision requires only an occasion. The occasion arrived today, or was manufactured - the record does not yet distinguish, and may never.

Consider what each party actually holds. The American fleet can burn tankers at will; it has done so. Iran can close or threaten the strait, Harass shipping with small boats, and answer with missiles fired from its own coast. Neither can destroy the other. Both can impose costs that the other’s assembly will eventually find intolerable. This is the arithmetic beneath every exchange of fire, and the exchange itself changes nothing in the arithmetic. The tankers were sunk and the tankers were always going to be sunk, whichever ship fired first.

I notice the language of the communiqué: the word “targeted” doing the work of justification, the retaliation framed as necessity. Every war begins with such words. The city that believes itself provoked writes the provocation into its official record, and the record is believed at home for exactly as long as the war goes well.

What follows is the part I know best. Escalations of this kind acquire their own momentum; the leaders who began them find the exits narrower than the entrances. The missiles fired today cost less than the missiles that will be demanded tomorrow.

I record it plainly, so that whoever reads later cannot say the pattern was unseen while it was happening.